Former Parks Gardeners Guilty of Soliciting Bribe : Crime: The two men asked an offender sentenced to community service at a Northridge facility if he wanted to buy his way out of the work.

Two former Los Angeles city parks gardeners were convicted Monday of soliciting a bribe from a convicted offender sentenced to work in the parks instead of going to jail, and authorities disclosed that other city employees have been fired on similar grounds.

But as part of a plea-bargain agreement, charges of actually accepting the bribe--which authorities said they captured on audiotape in a sting operation--were dropped against the two longtime employees of the city Department of Recreation and Parks.

Willard M. Stone and Manuel G. Perez, who supervised cleanup efforts at several city parks in the San Fernando Valley, agreed to plead no contest--the equivalent of a guilty plea for criminal court purposes--to one felony count each of soliciting a bribe. Neither Stone nor Perez spoke during a brief hearing in Los Angeles Municipal Court downtown, except to reply “No contest” when asked for their pleas.

Afterward, both men and their lawyers refused comment on the case or the plea bargain.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Carol Straughn defended the agreement, saying the lesser charges, which include altering public documents, were approved so the case would not have to go to trial.

“They did enter the plea at an early stage. I think they wanted to get this behind them,” said Straughn, a Special Investigations Division prosecutor. “We felt that at this stage, this (solicitation) count pretty much stated what the crime was.”

Both men were placed on three years felony probation, ordered to perform 400 hours of community service work with the California Department of Transportation and pay a fine of up to $1,000 each.

Stone, 54, a senior gardener from Granada Hills, and Perez, 41, a Pacoima gardener-caretaker, were fired March 1 because of the bribe solicitation. Both had worked for the city more than 10 years, and both have appealed their cases, which will be heard by a hearing examiner with the city’s Board of Civil Service Commissioners.

The Times originally disclosed last October that the Recreation and Parks Department had launched a citywide investigation into possible corruption within its ranks. The agency was concerned that controls were lax in the mammoth community service program under which convicted offenders are sentenced to do unpaid work for local government or civic agencies instead of going to jail.

On Monday, city officials confirmed that the investigation did uncover corruption and that two other full-time employees and several part-time workers were fired recently for alleged wrongdoing.

“There was no way we could prove they were taking bribes, but we proved to our satisfaction that what they were doing was definitely, totally inappropriate,” said Elliott Porter, the department’s personnel director.

Porter would not elaborate, citing the employees’ right to confidentiality. He said that most of the dismissed employees worked with those sentenced to community service in the central part of the city.

The case against Stone and Perez stems from a September, 1992, incident in which the two asked Glenn Schiff, who had been convicted of a minor offense in a Newhall court, if he wanted to buy his way out of 125 hours of community service by paying them $125, authorities said.

Perez and his boss, Stone, oversaw dozens of court-ordered community service workers who were sent out on cleanup jobs at San Fernando Valley parks each week from the department’s Northridge District Maintenance Yard, where the bribe solicitation took place.

Schiff complained to police about the bribe solicitation. Police equipped him with a hidden recorder, and he taped conversations with Stone and Perez in which he not only discussed the bribe but gave them the money they asked for on Oct. 5, said Detective Tom Henton of the Los Angeles Police Department. Schiff could not be reached for comment.

The case marks the first time in at least 18 years that a supervisor, in this case Stone, has been formally accused of bribery, Porter said. Even selling signatures for $1 an hour was significant, Porter said, given the hundreds of offenders sentenced each month to perform community service and the cash-strapped city’s reliance on them to clean up parks and other facilities.

Since the arrests of Stone and Perez, the Recreation and Parks Department has instituted a number of controls to protect against such abuse, including limiting the number of supervisors who can approve the time cards of offenders in community service, Porter said.